New Orleans Superintendent of Police Clarence Giarrusso was trying futilely to get out of a parking lot at Tulane Stadium when the police radio sputtered out word of the shooting at Central Lockup. Pinned in by a solid wall of honking automobiles, he called for a motorcycle patrolman to clear a path through the stalled traffic. For Giarrusso, a small man tightly wound on nervous energy, the delay was maddening. He almost felt like getting out of the car and running.
After the Sugar Bowl, Giarrusso had planned to pick up Lieutenant John Hughes, his executive assistant, and drive to a friend’s house for an early New Year’s breakfast. Attending the yearly feast was a tradition, but now food was the last thing on Giarrusso’s mind. He had caught only the end of the emergency broadcast and had asked for a repeat. With a crackle of static the message was retransmitted. When he realized that a cadet had been shot by a sniper, his anxiety ballooned.
It took less than five minutes for a motorcycle cop to get to Giarrusso’s stranded car. When he pulled up alongside, Giarrusso stuck his head out the window and shouted, “Get me the hell out of here.” With that, the cop, using his siren in short bursts, began to open a narrow channel between the two rows of cars that were inching down the one-way street. Pulling in behind him, Giarrusso was soon able to get to Claiborne Avenue. From there, with his escort barreling through red lights in front of him, it was a straight, short drive to headquarters.
Meanwhile, the chaos that had followed the sniping continued, and men were frantically combing the field behind the lockup looking for a hidden gunman. Among them were homicide detectives Charles Faught and Lynn Schneider. The two partners had been sitting in their car waiting to have the gas tank filled when they heard the firing and jumped out to investigate. Stopping only momentarily to check Harrell, the cadet who had been shot, they ran down the sally-port tunnel into the field with their pistols drawn. They saw nothing.
Two other detectives, John Kastner and Edward Clogher, were also among the first on the scene and were quickly joined by Lieutenants Robert Mutz and Lawrence Vigurie, two senior homicide men who told them to take charge of the investigation inside the lockup. Mutz and Vigurie would direct the search of the field. Vigurie, who had spent years as supervisor of the homicide squad which worked the midnight-to-dawn shift, carried an armload of flashlights with him.
“That’s not going to do it, Larry,” Mutz said. “We got to get this area lit up like a torch.”
Vigurie agreed. “I’ll get the fire department to send over one of their light trucks,” he said, and handing the flashlights to Mutz he went back inside the building to make the necessary telephone calls.
The equipment Vigurie wanted consisted of three powerful spotlights bolted to the bed of a flat-bottomed truck, which the fire department used for fighting large fires at night. Within fifteen minutes the truck was parked near the field, providing enough light for a baseball game.
With the spotlights in place, Mutz lined up ten men shoulA der-to-shoulder and marched them back and forth across the field, looking for evidence. A detective yelled that he had found something, and Mutz came running. The detective was hunched over a .38-caliber, blue-steel Colt revolver, and Mutz saw immediately that the serial numbers had been filed off. Lying nearby were four spent Winchester Western casing and two live rounds. The pistol and ammunition were behind a stack of sewer pipe about three feet high. Mutz sent the pistol and shells to the crime lab so that they could be dusted for finger prints. Then he measured the distance to the lockup with his eyes, less than a football field, 250 feet at most, he thought. A good shot for a sniper working at night.
“Look at this,” said a cop standing near him. “He must have set off some firecrackers to throw us.” Burned fragments of red-and-blue paper littered the ground. Part of the charred wick was still intact.
“Lieutenant, over here!” someone shouted, and Mutz jogged to where three men stood around a jagged block of concrete about 150 feet behind the spot where the pistol had been found. It was on the fringe of the illuminated area, and they had their flashlights trained on two spent casings. A string of firecrackers was laid out neatly on top of the concrete. They had not been fired. Picking up one of the casings and carefully checking the caliber, Mutz shook his head; he recognized it immediately.
“It looks like the bastard was using magnums,” said a cop who had just come from the lockup.
“Any word on Harrell?”
“He’d dead. They just called from Charity. He was DOA.”
“What about Perez?”
“He got hit in the ankle, but he’ll be all right. They’ve got him doped up.”
By then the sally port and the field had been sealed off. A crude figure chalked on the floor of the sally port marked where Harrell had fallen. A dark stain was at the center of the figure, and an officer from the crime lab was bent over it, snapping photographs, the strobe flashing in the tunnel like lightning.
Nearby, a few men were talking about Harrell. They spoke quietly, one of them recounting how, some months earlier, the cadet had checked in ten minutes late for roll call. In the midst of a chewing out by his supervisor, Harrell had softly explained that he had taken his pregnant wife to a hospital. He had apologized for being late.
“How long did you say they were married?”
“About a year.”
“Jeez.”
“They just had a baby.”
“Jeez.”
“Has anyone called his wife?”
No one answered.
The men turned their attention to Kastner and Clogher. Working slowly, meticulously, the two detectives eventually located four of the seven bullets that had been fired into the lockup. One of the rounds had punctured a metal sign attached to the bottom of the Perdido Street gate, leaving a neat hole almost a half-inch in diameter. The bullet that struck Harrell and Perez was dug out of the concrete wall at the rear of the sally port, 107 feet from where the cadet had fallen. Another was embedded in the ceiling of the tunnel. All of the fragments were sent off for testing, each in a separate plastic bag. Alex Vega, chief of ballistics, had been called from home and was already at work. He quickly determined that all of the bullets had been fired from the same weapon, probably a .44-caliber-magnum carbine.
These tests were still underway when Giarrusso’s black Chrysler screeched into the underground garage and jerked to a halt. Lieutenant Hughes, who had arrived fifteen minutes earlier and taken charge of the overall investigation, was waiting for him.
“Good Christ, John. What do we have?” Giarrusso said as he slammed the door. “Spell it out.”
With a flat, unemotional voice Hughes, a baldish man with a wide, pitted face, recited what had happened and told of the progress of the investigation so far. His account was concise and blunt. As chief of the department’s Inspections Unit (it checked other divisions for efficiency), Hughes had a reputation for assimilating bulky chunks of fragmented information, sorting them, then summarizing quickly and accurately. He had doubled as Giarrusso’s executive assistant for a little over a year.
“We’ve got one dead, Cadet Alfred Harrell, and Horace Perez was grazed in the ankle. We’re fanning out in the neighborhood now, looking for suspects, but we’ve got no idea how many were involved or who we’re looking for. The only thing we know for sure is that they’ve got an awful big gun. Ballistics says it’s a magnum carbine.”
“Where’s Henry?” Giarrusso asked, referring to Chief of Detectives Henry Morris.
“He’s on his way,” Hughes said. Morris had been fighting the flu all week but had climbed out of bed, swallowed a couple of aspirins, and headed downtown as soon as he got word of the shooting.
As he hurried to the sally port with the sharp, back-braced stride of an ex-Marine (he had served in the Pacific during World War Two), Giarrusso asked about Harrell’s background.
“You know him,” Hughes said. “He used to work in CID(Central Investigations Division — the official name for the detective squad). A big kid. He must have been dead when he hit the ground.”
“We’ll go to the hospital later,” Giarrusso said. “Have his relatives been notified?”
“I called Father Rogers,” Hughes said. He didn’t have to say anything else. The Catholic priest, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate, was the police chaplain who notified the family after an “accident.”
“John, I want every available man, everyone we can shake loose, working on this,” Giarrusso said. “We’ve got to find that bastard. It’s the first man I’ve lost. I don’t want to lose another.” (Since Giarrusso’s appointment as superintendent in mid1970, no New Orleans police officer had died in the line of duty. The last fatality was in 1969 when a car hit a traffic cop. Within the next week, the statistics would jump dramatically.)
As Giarrusso arrived in the sally port, the measuring and questioning was going ahead full speed. After a briefing by Kastner, he stopped to talk with a reporter from the Times- Picayune. The reporter, knowing his paper was after deadline, had dogged Giarrusso almost from the moment he got out of his car.
“We just don’t know yet what we’ve got,” Giarrusso told him. “You’re asking for motives, suspects, and we don’t know any of that. Christ, man. The blood is still wet here.”
Undaunted, the reporter asked whether he thought it was the work of a “militant group.” Staring at the ground, Giarrusso delayed a moment before he answered.
“Look, as soon as we get into this a little, I might have some answers for you. Right now, I just don’t know.”
Writing furiously on his pad, the reporter hurried off for the nearest telephone to call in four or five paragraphs to be inserted in boldface in the final edition. As he departed, Giarrusso asked that someone from the Public Information Office be notified. He knew what he was in for from the media and wanted the “proper channels” established immediately.
About that time it started all over again — rifle fire, someone screaming that he was hit, policemen throwing themselves bellyflat on the ground, squinting into the blackness for a target. Even Giarrusso was stunned.
“It was unreal,” he recalled later. “We thought the sniper had come back. I organized a group of men and made sure they all had shotguns and we took off running in the direction of the shots. They seemed to have come from the houses behind a lot facing South White. (The lot was the construction site of the newly begun Orleans Parish Prison.) There were three, maybe four, houses and I had men fan out next to them and we started pounding on doors.”
Soon there were shouts and a door was kicked open and five men, all staggeringly drunk, were herded onto the sidewalk, their hands over their heads as flashlights shone in their faces. One of them, his tongue thick with liquor, excitedly explained how they had decided to celebrate the New Year by firing a shotgun and a deer rifle into the air. The shotgun pellets, it turned out, had landed in the field behind the lockup, one of them grazing the hand of a man operating the spotlights. Two of the five were arrested for discharging weapons in the city. Giarrusso, as the episode shows, was not afraid to jump into the thickets. He had demonstrated the same trait barely a month after his appointment when he took command at the scene during a shoot-out with a band of Black Panthers. He exposed himself to fire repeatedly and, as a result, was criticized in a report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which said he had exercised “poor command procedures.” Giarrusso’s response was, “The rightful place for any police chief, or any commander for that matter, is leading his men. I will always be in front of my troops where I belong.”
By the time Giarrusso returned to the lockup, Henry Morris had been briefed, and was waiting for him. Considered a cop’s cop — one who had spent years working his way up through the ranks — Morris was known throughout the department as “the Major.” Chief of detectives since 1966, he had at his command over 150 men. Tall and heavy set, Morris was a few years Giarrusso’s senior and, before Giarrusso’s appointment, had been considered by many to be the top contender for the superintendent’s job. (As a result, Giarrusso’s selection had caused some bitterness in the department.) An excellent administrator, Morris had attended the Harvard Business School and countless graduate seminars, but more importantly, he had also spent the better part of twenty years on the streets, earning a reputation for cracking the hard cases through sheer doggedness. As usual, he had something to report.
“We’ve got a woman and kid who say they saw two blacks driving away from the lockup at high speed just after the shots. I’ve got some people with them now.”
“They give a description?”
“Yeah, but it’s not much,” Morris said. “One tall, the other short, both with Afros, driving a white 1957 Chevrolet with a piece of chrome hanging loose.”
“This is going to be a bad one, Henry,” Giarrusso said as the two men stood waiting for the elevator to his office on the fifth floor. “That sonofabitch is going to be back. You can count on it.”
A chain smoker, Giarrusso lit a cigarette and began twisting his class ring, a habit he had when worried. His mother had given him the ring when he graduated from Tulane University in 1955 with a degree in business administration. It was one of three degrees he had earned during countless hours in night school. The others were in criminology and law. After a stint in the Marines, Giarrusso had joined the police department in 1949 as a motorcycle patrolman. He meant for it to be only a summer job while he was an undergraduate at Tulane, but when September rolled around he was, as he put it, hooked. “I thought I would be afraid of those Harleys, but I found I loved it — racing down the street at eighty miles an hour, the wind hitting you in the face. No, when the summer was over, I knew I wanted to be a cop bad.”
In 1954 Giarrusso made sergeant and was transferred to narcotics, where he stayed until his appointment to superintendent. By then he was a captain and, since 1968, narcotics commander. Two years later he succeeded his younger brother, Joe, to the department’s top job. Joseph Giarrusso had been appointed superintendent by former Mayor Chep Morrison in 1960 in the wake of a graft and kickback scandal that had implicated many of the department’s ranking officers. Morrison had dipped below the tainted high command to pick Joseph Giarrusso, a thirty-six-year-old lieutenant whose honesty and toughness were unquestioned. In 1970, when Giarrusso left the force to open a security-guard agency, newly elected Mayor Moon Landrieu did the same thing. Passing over several majors to pick the forty-seven-year-old captain, he said that when he went through the personnel jackets of possible candidates he “kept coming back to the one labeled Clarence Giarrusso.”
Inevitably, politics also was involved in the selection. Landrieu, who was elected largely on the strength of a heavy black vote, had promised during the campaign to bring more minority group members into the police department.
Clarence Giarrusso promptly announced that he wanted to be “superintendent for all the people.” In a matter of days he picked Captain Sidney Cates as his chief deputy for administration, making him the city’s highest ranking black official since Reconstruction. With Giarrusso, however, politics wasn’t the overriding concern. He was genuinely committed to opening up the department to blacks and actively recruited them.
Shortly after Morris and Giarrusso switched on the lights in the superintendent’s office, a cavernous room with dark blue carpeting, their one fragile lead, the description of the two blacks in the Chevrolet, evaporated. The car, stolen from an elderly black man while he was attending church services, was recovered a few blocks away. Two of the man’s cousins had “borrowed” it for a joyride.